The Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow

Advanced Search in a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

The Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow

Lesson 36 of 41

Advanced Search in a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

Lesson Info

Advanced Search in a Portfolio in Lightroom CC

Now we're going to show you how to use your portfolio so for that I'm actually go to a real portfolio that has use because I am actually using it right now so I'm going to go to my working catalog drive because that is where my portfolio is going my portfolio catalogue the portfolio itself is in this drive over here but I have my portfolio in this drive so that I can run around and play with it so I open this up, okay? So I am now in my portfolio do you notice some of these photographs come from my job that I've already sent in here my portfolio ends up having a little bit mohr copies of images than it should because when I teach I keep putting crap in my portfolio and so I keep getting the same copies of the same things over and over again, but luckily there is a, uh, there's a, uh plug into light room that you can get and I think it's on the photographer's toolbox dot com that will look for duplicates so everyone so I just have to go look for duplicates and it takes all the suspected...

duplicates and puts him in a cat a collection and says these are suspected duplicates and then I can just go and delete all the stray stuff that's come in from teaching people all the time, okay the other thing you'll notice is in my portfolio I keep bad images in my portfolio too because I like to teach and so when I teach sometimes I need to show someone ah bad image instead of a good image and so I have out of focus images I have images that are screwed up I have images that are underexposed overexposed so and I can search for him so I can search by I need something that is a bad image that is has a bright innit it's out of focus and that was using f one point two and so then I can look at that and say now this is why it's out of focus because I was using at one point too and no one can focus a f one point to you know it's like you know so maybe there's someone superman can focus the f one point to but in orderto have focus that at one point two even if you're using a really good auto focus system you need to be quite a ways away from it because like here's focus there is not there it's in out in out in out if I breathe it goes out of focus because you're just moving it a little bit so I'll use one point to it a wedding on ly if I'm across the room and showing the whole floor and then I can focus on the bride and the father of the bride dancing and that's usually when I want to use that one point to have a fifty one point two and I'll turn put the fifty one point two on solely for that one point two moment where they're dancing and the lights all coming down on or whatever and all they're there and focus and everything else is just all blurry and out of focus and stuff and plus I get perfect light and I don't even need any kind of flash or anything like that so that's a perfect use for it but doesn't that you know it's fairly useless the beauty of one point two lens is that you can stop it down two two point and it's magnificent at two point eight it's like you have to have the one point two so that the two point it can be great so anyway that being said if I wanted to look for something inside of my portfolio I might want to find all images that have goats in them so if I wanted to do that there's several ways I could do it the first ways you could just simply go up here to the filter and you could type text and you could type in goats you say I want to go toe pulip ago um so that's one way you could do it uh you consort by all images that air two stars with goats so all of that stuff can happen right up here you could even sort buy you know, all images that have you know that I have well let's look for, you know, all images that aaron a specific country that have goats in them, you could do that as well. So there's a lot of different options as to what you could sort for so let's assume though, that we want to sort for goats, so I'm going to go down here over to the right and I'm going to I want to look for goats I don't want to look for goats don't want like scan for goats I want I want a folder that any time I shoot a picture of a goat it automatically goes to that folder so that I never have to search for it again. I just find the pictures of goats, so I'm going to go down to everyone's looking at me like why in the world that you wanted just trust me there's a payoff because everybody likes go pictures, right? Auras I'm I the only one so here's my collection, I'm gonna create a collection so the collection's going to me magnificent magnificent is tnt or anti magnificent goats, okay, that's what we're gonna do and we're gonna put it inside of our creative life segment and we're going to tell it to include actually no old shoot and I'm doing the wrong kind hold on got to go back down here I got to create a smart collection I created a regular collection regular collections require me to drag it whereas a smart collections going to do it on its own. So let's, go back to our smart collection controls here and let's go magnificent goats. All right, so I want goats I'm going to say they have to. Well, let's, I want anything with goats don't care. I don't care if it's good or bad just want goat. Um, but I need tohave the keywords goats, so because if I type in goats, I can also funny because I apparently have searched for this before. And if I search for this before, if I just type in g o uh a g e o r g o a t then that could be part of another word. And so if you search by any metadata, it could be I don't know what other word would start with goat, but you could get other words. You know, um, but instead I want to search for keywords so that it's saying, I have to find this specific word not as part of another word, so I'm going to say it needs to be, uh contains words not contains all because if you contains all it could be part of another word for instance I uh I searched last night I search for bus and I got pictures of george bush because apparently it was in a business meeting I don't I don't know what it was but there was somewhere in the key words or text or whatever that there was a bus in that event and so it it showed pictures of george w bush and I was like okay well that's fine but I know I want buses so then if you search for key word buses then it will I find it so I'm going to say that it contains the word and it needs to be goat all right so that's all I just want that just goats and then if we find too many goats weaken likes whittle it down and change the change what we need to do and get the right goats but I'm gonna hit create and there they are goats so you can see like this particular image here is a very special one of mine that goat was I love this this is my friend's wedding album not well it's not his wedding album it's thirteen weddings it's a he's a musician that's the album thirteen weddings and this is our cover for um the s o here's the caption I wrote on it so let me show you the caption says every time we make an album cover for musical artist kevin burke. We try to do something out of the ordinary I think we accomplished it with this with this image the real struggle was getting the goat into the dress after that she was a perfect lady so then check out the album, right? So and she was she's a perfect lady so you and you can see this is actually the shoot so there is the goat that's the goat's head there's the goats legs so that we could make them and then there's the full picture and then there's the cropped version. This is the original place so you can see we set the goat down and then cropped her in. So but but you can see how easy it is for me to find a particular thing if I want a wedding. If I want to find the album cover thirteen weddings, I can search for it by saying album cover I can search for it by saying thirteen weddings I can search kevin burdick or aiken search goat any of those are going to get me to that same place. It was very easy for me to find things that I'm looking for. I could also create a um ah smart collection that would look for brides that air have flowers in the shot so I would search for bride flowers and maybe even search by you know the people who made them so if I said bride flowers pedal pushers is the name of company than those three things together would find me a set of images that contain on ly flowers with the bride that were made by the company pedal pushers that's it so yes I think this is just kind of out there on goat yeah top of go yeah because you're so into that um do you have to get a model release from the owners if you're refusing animals well I guess you could you could if the owner of the animal was using it professionally you could probably say yes because maybe it's a record if it was a film maybe but this go I can tell you it has amateurs not different it's an amateur go and you would not be able to know what goat it wass I know which goat it was because this particular goat headbutted me in the groin oh that's the one and then ate my shirt that's the one you know that you know that thing about goats where they eat anything this go literally came up and ripped my shirt almost off my body just grabbed it and went and just started eating my shirt my shirt was just tor into pieces just wanted my shirt pictures of you have pictures of that happening because I have video of it yeah fantastic yeah, so but the way specifically searched out the go owner on craigslist they said we'd come and shoot you know? So we came in the go owner was helping us hold the goat laughing at me when I was getting head butted in the groin and we had a great time it was lots of fun goats you had a question so you could create a smart collection like he did there and you could also go into the without actually creating the collection you could you also searched just using the search functions up above correct okay, so it's the same process search but the purpose of smart collection is to limit your need to keep doing that. So if it's a one time search that you'll never search for again then that's the way to go but one of the things you'll find is a smart collection has a lot more power in it because you can do if then so if I double click this it's right here and I could say so there's there's you could just say I want this plus I want that plus I want this plus I want that so you could do some of that but you also have the ability to create if then type of rules so if you hit the option key that turns into a hashtag so if you hit that click on that see if it starts to put the it dated trade trees them so now you can create a rule within a rule within a rule within a rule so now you can do logical processes and say ok, I want all of these to be true or all of these to be true or all of these to be true or you could say I want any of these to be true and any of these to be true and any of these to be true so once you start doing that this could do an incredible amount of searching for you on a regular basis so that then any time you came to your smart collection you could say I am literally looking for a bride with a girl child or a bride with a boy child but we have to have the groom in the shot during that you know and I could get those because I would have child I would have bride I would have groom and I could search that out, but I couldn't do that in the in the main search window because I could only just do one set of criteria whereas this I could do a whole bunch if then and yours and hands so that it's just very helpful in that regard s o I'm gonna cancel that out so we don't change that search but um what what I find myself doing is this you remember how when we were key wording we went from like macro to micro right we went way wide and then we started searching down well when we do that here we do the same thing so we we make a smart collection that looks at all sixty thousand images and that will give us a very large scope of the things so I'll take the sixty thousand and parrot down toe on ly the weddings that have a bride then you can take that and search within that smart collection and say okay now inside of here I just want to see this stuff that was shot with a long lens because I know that that's goingto have a background that's a little bit more blown out and that's going to separate better and if I have a long lens oh and if I shot at it so if I really let's say I'm trying to do a advertisement for my business and I want to have a bride in the shot but I know that I want to put text all over the photograph so I'ma search for brides I'm also going to search for the key word vacancy because any time I have something with lots of vacancy I'm gonna put that key word in there well search for bride vacancy and then within that smart search I will go up to the the main collection are the main selection area that the filter and I would go into the filter and then I would start searching for I want anything that was shot with a long lens so anywhere from just the two, seventy, two hundred lens and it was shot with seventy, two hundred lens and it was shot at two point eight f four I know that between those two things most of the images I get back we're gonna have blown out backgrounds where there's nothing that's going to interfere with my text and so now I have you know, fifty or sixty or one hundred images that all fit that criteria I can look at him say ok, these are the three that work the best now I'm gonna make a regular physical collection and I'm gonna make it the same name is whatever that searches so it's sitting right next to it and then I'm just going on a minute when I do it so if I if I was looking for these goat pictures I would come up and then say okay, I want a collection and I want to create that collection I want to call it goats um and I'm gonna put it so I'm gonna I'm not gonna include the selected photos I'm going to make it as target collection so then when I create it it doesn't doesn't if you make one and say put these images in it will move you to that collection and that always bothers me, so I instead I make it a target collection and then I don't put it in now I can just cycle through my smart collection and say, I want this one because I don't want to show this one I don't want to show it is I want to show the full photo because I think the full photo is worthy of shelling and so now I'm in a hit be the bee key will add it to the target collection, so I had b and so now it is inside the target collection called goats, and so if I want to go to the target collection if I hit control our command, be or control be on a pc, it takes me the target collection there's my one image now notice that the caption wasn't put on this one, so I need to go back so I hit command be again, I'm going to go back here, I'm gonna highlight this image here and I'm going to synchronize, so I'm gonna slept to here and I'm gonna synchronize that stuff right there, so I just hit sink uh, go to the grid sink metadata when I think the meta data I'm going to go and sink everything so it's see it's synchronizing a lot of nothing but it's, synchronizing my key words and it's also synchronizing my um my headline and my caption and all that so I have synchronized so now everything synchronized over so then when I go back to this the target collection now those air all in there so now if I want to then publish this um I can publish this so I'm going go down to my facebook and I'm going to say hot off the press all right let's just go toe on creative live dragon onto their so now it's in a published service it's going to a amalgam called on creative live and I'm gonna hit published and it's going to publish with the headline not necessarily the caption because facebook doesn't take that caption but but if I send it to my blogged then my blogged would take that caption so any questions we have some are all images in the portfolio images d n gs or are there other formats there's a tiff there's ps d's there's d n g's and then sometimes there's a j peg because I might shoot something with an iphone and so I might get a j peg back and then I have you know other things like you khun cpn jesus well and so I have p and g's which are my logos and stuff like that so those air in there as well but in most cases there might be some cr two's in there as well from mistakenly exporting to the portfolio before I make him into dan ji's and so I can occasionally go in and clean up my portfolio just by searching for all cr twos or all raw photos that aren't de ngs and then just convert them to d n gs so you can kind of clean that up and then occasionally you should go through your, uh you're performing catalog and have somebody else look at it so I occasionally have my assistant come in and look at my portfolio and he rejects stuff from the portfolio he'll just kind of scan through and just and just reject stuff and then I'll sort for the rejected images look for anything that I either want to keep for teaching or I want to keep because it's a sentimental thing of my kid or whatever and then I'll delete the rest because if some if somebody who's my assistant thinks it's crap, I should probably get rid of it. So that's helpful tohave a second set of eyes look at your portfolio just don't have your husband or wife because then you'll get in trouble with each other, you'll be mad at each other. So uh so are you searching, um on ly the files in your working catalogue? Where are the files you're searching for? Okay, I'm searching for images in the portfolio, not in the working catalog working catalog you khun search while you're working in there, but you pretty much already know what you're looking for because you were looking at it and you're working on it. So the working catalogue is not a place to search it's a place to work and it's a place to broad like to share out to get to get the stuff delivered. But then, once you're done delivering the job itself, then the best stuff goes to the portfolio. And then when you come to the portfolio, really are coming to the portfolio for two purposes, either for nostalgia and fun or for marketing purposes. That's what? You're coming to the portfolio for that's when you start searching? Yeah, uh, the size of your portfolio. Uh, I know you told us earlier about keeping the size down, but how many images do you have? Totally near port for fifty two thousand five hundred twenty five. So, are you worried about that? You said earlier the because the folder size was what you were keeping it under a couple of thousand or something. No adornments is not an issue unless unless the folder gets too big. Correct. So the portfolio, obviously, if I had a million photos in the portfolio, it might get slow, but the size of the portfolio is less important than the individual sizes of your cat your folders because once you get to your folder you've limited the number of images that light room has to pay attention to and so then it can work a little faster it'll bog down on the big numbers but once you get to the small numbers it operates pretty well so I like to keep it lower than higher I think fifty two thousand images is a bit much but it takes a while to go weed through those and so I just do it on occasion whenever I have time which is almost never on dh so that's why I have an assistant do it assistant comes in looks at it and I trust that the assistant will go through and find most of the crap and so when they find the crap I I can get rid of it um if they think it's bad that I'm goingto probably agree unless you know usually sometimes there's stuff they'll they'll say that's not a good image and I'll say what do you you kidding me that's an amazing image but that's because I shot at you know, so I have my have my feelings about it or whatever anyway, but I'm usually right right usually okay, so um that is the process of making your portfolio um can you sink your published services across different catalogues? Um you can't synchronize them you're published services are always the same in everyone, so, like if you've installed the next gen published service inside ofyour in any catalogue, when you open any catalog, it will be there because light room uses the same pool of plug ins for every catalog so it's going to be there. But as you noticed when we made our new portfolio, none of those services were actually connected. I will tell you the secret how to do it, though you khun it's, not a synchronization. So if you change things it's not going to synchronize to the other catalog, but I'll tell you how to set yourself up. So if I were in a position where I wanted to create a unified and uniform publishing and, you know, setting circumstance crossed all of my catalogs, what I would do is I would create one catalog, and that catalog would have all of the things set up, though it have my facebook logged in, and I would have my all of my public services than it would have all of my folders set up and everything would be the way I want it. And once I had set that up, I would call that my template, then I would close it, and then every time I wanted to make a new catalog, I would make sure that I copied that catalog to the location where I want the catalogue to exist name it something different and when you name something when you name it something different when you go like if I wanted to change the name of this portfolio catalog, I have to change portfolio catalog toe, say, portfolio of cats catalogue or whatever and then I would goat goat catalog, and then on this one, I'd have to say goat catalog space, smart previews and this one would have to say goat catalog space previews so you have to have all three of those things say the same thing once you do that, you would have the catalogue. Now, if your catalog didn't have anything in it, you wouldn't need to have any of these preview you wouldn't have to have either of these files at all. You could literally just have this, and if I were you, I'd put it in your dropbox or on your creative cloud account so that you can draw it down from any once you establish that catalogue and it's connected where it needs to be connected. Put that onto your dropbox that you have it available and you can just drag it down anywhere, right? So once you've got that established, then what you would do and you say, I'm making a catalogue for my portfolio and I already have a portfolio over here but I'm making a catalogue with this portfolio with all of these plug ins set up and everything. So what I would do is I'd open the blank one. And then from the blank one, I would go to the file import from another catalog, and I would literally import my full, amazingly huge catalog into this blank one, because the blank one has all the setup and this one's just a bunch images, so import it and leave it it's going to take all night to bring in a fifty thousand image catalog. But then what? You what you've established here can be utilized across every catalogue. So you would just do that let's say you had three catalogs. You had a portfolio catalog, you had a working catalog, and then you had, like, some other catalogue. So you would do this three times. You'd copy it three times and you open it and say, this is my portfolio. Grab the old portfolio catalog and imported in all the photos would come in. All the information would come in. But now you're plug ins would be established. The other way to do it would have to go and open this one. And go in and establish all of the settings for these plug ins and then go to this one and establish all the settings for this plug in then goodall and so then you might get something wrong you might set it up the same way or whatever so as many plugin a cz many public services I have I would much rather do it the way I just told you it's kind of a knot not a sink situation but kinda right when you upload a j peg files to the cloud or two drop box or any cloud based storage does that file become compressed in there for growth through a second compression when re downloaded I've avoided cloud based stored for fear that my files go through some sort of uh compression or integrity destructions are they doing any sort of secret math in the clubs? Okay, so smug mug takes your file puts it in a spot doesn't do anything to it and then it compresses other versions of it for sending out you know to people on the web but then if someone wants to like if you gave someone purchase access to it or whatever it would download the original un compressed image to them got it or you could say don't deliver the un compressed image deliver a smaller image to them on dh then when they send it to print so in what if someone orders from smugmug then they take that original, un compressed file and that's what they deliver over the white house and white house prints from that so smug mug, does it right? There are some places that don't do it right, and they do compress. So you have to check with your individual service and find out. Are you compressing my images, or are you leaving them untouched that's? Just something you ask them, but smugmug itself doesn't do it if you were to do it to your word press and you're not loud next gen to do it because next gen also has a component where you can sell stuff you can actually do an entire, um, sales uh uh, shopping car on your word press and sell stuff from there. And so when they if they if you institute that when you upload, you could upload your full file up there a swell, and then it would do the math and compute smaller versions, but the original would stay there. So it just depends on who the services and what kind of plug in you're using to get there. So just do your math. Do you army? Do your research on

In The Ultimate Lightroom Classic CC Workflow, Jared will show you how to radically cut your workflow time while improving the quality of your product and the organization of your digital world.

Jared will teach you how to:

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Get your computer and software to run faster

Efficiently cull and retouch photographs

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Deliver and share your images directly from Lightroom

Jared will share tips on improving every phase of your workflow – from shooting to archiving. You’ll learn how to take advantage of the latest Lightroom tools and features and become faster and more skilled at adjusting your images.

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